10-19-2026, 01:43 AM
They were beneath Khamovniki now, west-southwest of the Kremlin, somewhere under the buried streets between Plyushchikha and the old medical quarter at Devichye Pole.
Above them, the tunnel that brought them here had taken hours for the six of them to cut through the buried city grid, angling toward coordinates the Kremlin said corresponded to an old access point into the Undercity infrastructure. If the route worked, it could give them a path toward the hospital district without excavating another full surface corridor through twenty meters of snow.
The problem was the entrance. Their tunnel ended in what looked, at first glance, like an ordinary concrete wall. Once the surrounding snow and debris had been cleared, the remains of an old service vestibule emerged from beneath it: cracked masonry, a corroded lintel, and the outline of a heavy steel door was entombed behind later construction.
Whatever it had once been, someone had sealed it thoroughly. The steel had been welded at the frame, then covered behind poured concrete thick enough that a conventional crew would have spent hours drilling through it, assuming the vibration did not damage whatever remained behind the wall. Under ordinary conditions the entrance was effectively impassable. It was almost funny how ordinary conditions had become increasingly irrelevant.
That was why all six Dominions on site were standing beneath a knotted off orb of working lights considering how to proceed. Conventional rescue personnel waited farther back, beyond the reinforced section of the branch tunnel. Karim had insisted on that much before anyone touched the seal. They determined the safe point behind which all the civilians remained, a place of retreat if one was needed. From his place in the Kremlin guiding their process, Ascendancy had agreed. Then he had released the maps that now populated all their displays.
Karim stood with the tablet balanced against one palm, studying the section that had appeared in his clearance less than ten minutes earlier. The difference between these maps and the municipal records was immediately apparent. Whole passages existed where the government surveys showed nothing. Service corridors connected facilities that officially had no connection at all. Old bunkers, maintenance routes and buried structures spread beneath Moscow in a network far more extensive than Karim had suspected. Someone had mapped it all carefully. Very carefully.
Distances were marked. Elevations recorded. Collapses noted. Some routes carried dates suggesting they had been physically inspected in the recent past. Whoever had done the work had gone far beyond compiling forgotten city plans. They had been down here. Walked these paths themselves. Karim couldn’t fathom who.
He enlarged the section closest to their position. Their new map confirmed that behind the sealed entrance lay a descending passage into an Undercity corridor. That route continued west before joining a larger artery that could potentially carry them toward Devichye Pole and the hospital district.
But along the way, the detail gradually became sparse. There was no notation indicating uncertainty or an inaccessible survey area. The map simply suggested the region was irregular. Several passages approached this particular area and seemingly curved around despite every structural reason suggested it should continue straight. However, even if they had to take a round-about path, it would still be swifter than above ground tunneling.
Dominik stood beside him, bundled against the cold that followed them even this far beneath the city. The cigarette Karim had forbidden him to smoke remained somewhere inside his coat, although Dominik’s fingers had developed an irritating habit of checking that fact whenever he thought Karim was not looking. He glanced at Karim’s face and said, “You have the face.”
Karim kept studying the map. “What face?”
“The one you get when you’re offended.”
Karim enlarged the sparse region another increment and grumbled.
“I just wish I knew who made this map.”
Dominik leaned closer. “Guess we’ll never know.”
They knew what was immediately behind the wall. They knew the first corridor had once been structurally sound. They knew where it should lead. All they had to do was open it, go straight, and should be able to confirm everything was structurally sound, and admit the civilians in behind them. It was the word should that bothered him.
It was only a short time ago that Ascendancy’s instructions had been issued to hold their position and wait for the very maps to load that were now in their possession. That they were not to extend farther than necessary until they knew what was on the other side. Karim had expected the next order to be one of retreat, but instead the opposite came.
Proceed.
There had been no explanation for the change from caution to proceeding, and Karim had not asked for one. Ascendancy was awake again, apparently earlier than planned, and his tone had made clear that whatever had interrupted his rest had also changed the nature of the operation.
He handed the tablet off and approached the wall. Their first task was not to break through. It was to understand how the entrance had been closed. Karim crouched near the exposed edge of the old frame and examined the concrete. It had been poured after the original structure was built that much was clear to the plain eye. But the Kremlin’s records said that there was steel beneath had been welded before that. A second layer of masonry had later been added over part of the vestibule. Three separate acts of closure. It seemed unusual but not impossible. Civil-defense infrastructure was abandoned badly all the time. Entrances were sealed in stages. Governments changed. Records disappeared. Someone worried about liability twenty years after someone else worried about security. Karim knew all of that. He still disliked it.
Dominik watched him a moment before asking,
“Fuck, Karim. Come on? Are you going to stare it open?”
Karim rose, fixing him with a look that Dominik couldn’t quite decide if he was serious. “I was considering making you dig it out by hand.”
As he finished speaking, Karim stepped back and seized the Power. Opening the entrance required far less force than carving the great snow corridors above, but considerably more care. He did not want to blast through the seal and discover that fifty years of corrosion had left half the structure waiting for an excuse to collapse. Around him, the others readied their power in case they had to suddenly catch something.
Sections of concrete separated cleanly from the older frame and moved aside where they were lowered out of the way rather than dropped. Corroded steel appeared beneath. Flows peeled the welds apart next, working along the frame until an old door finally became visible as a door rather than a shape buried in concrete.
It was thick enough to have once resisted blast pressure. Karim tested the hinges. Frozen with rust. He abandoned them and cut around the frame instead. The door moved inward only a few centimeters before stopping. Everyone went still. Karim felt for resistance through the weave. Not obstruction, but pressure. He eased it farther, and air pushed through the gap blasting him in the face.
Warm air. The difference was not dramatic, perhaps five or six degrees, but after days spent in frozen Moscow it touched his face with unsettling softness. Dominik noticed it too and murmured, “Warm air?.”
Karim glanced at him. “It’s not unusual, unexpected, but sometimes the pressure differences build up.”
Karim turned back toward the opening. The temperature itself was explainable. Deep structures maintained heat. Ground temperature changed slowly. Utility lines could contribute. Occupied areas of the Undercity might be nearby.
Together, the Dominions widened the opening enough to enter. The passage beyond descended gently for several meters before leveling into an old service corridor. It was quite ordinary with concrete walls, exposed pipes, even a cable tray sagging beneath bundles of wiring installed at several different points in history. Water stained one corner of the ceiling, though the floor beneath it was dry. Dust had accumulated along the edges where foot traffic had not disturbed it.
Karim stepped through first and waited. Nothing happened. The others came after them in a loose formation. Their lights pushed farther into the corridor and found nothing remarkable. Behind them, the cut-open blast door remained visible at the end of the short descent. Beyond it lay the pale snow tunnel they had carved through the storm. Beyond that, several kilometers of emergency infrastructure leading eventually back toward the Kremlin.
Karim checked the map as they slowly explored. The dimensions matched. Three-point-one meters wide. Two-point-seven high. The old utility chase along the left wall was exactly where the map said it would be. Even the slight change in elevation appeared correct. He felt ridiculous for being relieved.
They continued. Karim’s headset counted distance automatically as they proceeded.
About twenty meters farther the wall changed from poured concrete to older brick. The map showed the same transition. At thirty meters they passed a sealed service door on the right. Twenty-nine-point-four on the survey. Dominik examined the faded Russian lettering painted across it but did not touch the handle.
The first problem appeared forty-three meters later. Karim stopped, and the others stopped with him. He looked at the map’s display, then compared it to what his eyes beheld ahead. According to the survey, the passage should have ended twelve meters farther on, but the corridor continued well beyond that point before disappearing into darkness beyond the reach of their lights.
Karim walked forward slowly. Twelve meters became fifteen, then eighteen, and still no wall appeared. He checked the survey scale, but it was correct. He checked their positioning data next. The underground signal was weak, but the inertial tracking remained functional. According to the system, he had traveled twenty-one meters from the last marker.
The map allowed twelve-point-six. Karim turned around. The junction was close behind them, but too close. Dominik had stopped several paces away, watching Karim rather than the corridor. “There it is again.”
Karim barely heard him. “What?”
“The face.”
Karim walked back toward the junction. Seven steps. He stopped beneath the crossing pipes and looked at the position marker.
According to the tracker, those seven steps had carried him twenty-one meters.
The place where he had just been standing was perhaps seven meters away. He stood very still. No. Something was wrong with their systems, and he wasn’t going to allow them to proceed and possibly become lost.
Karim reset the inertial tracker and walked forward again, counting this time. At six paces he stopped and checked the reading, but it said he’d moved seventeen meters. He looked down at his feet as though they had somehow become participants in the problem, then returned to the junction. Six paces back.
Seventeen meters again, and Dominik’s humor had vanished.
Karim handed him the tablet. “Stand here.” Dominik took it without comment.
Karim walked forward along the corridor alone, ten meters by his own estimate, but the rangefinder told him he had gone twenty-six. He turned and sighted back toward Dominik who seemed barely far at all.
Every short measurement made sense on its own. Two nearby points remained exactly as far apart as they appeared. It was only when Karim tried to measure the corridor as a whole that the numbers became impossible.
He understood surveying errors. He understood instrument drift, bad maps, subsidence, undocumented reconstruction, even deliberate falsification. None of those could make six steps equal seventeen meters without also moving the people who had watched him take them.
Dominik came closer and said his name quietly. “Karim.”
“I know.”
He looked forward. The corridor appeared normal. That offended him more than if the walls had begun bending. There should have been some visible distortion. A slope. Curvature. Something his eyes could identify and his mind could measure. Instead, there was brick, concrete and old pipes continuing into darkness.
Karim took several more cautious steps, and this time he noticed the temperature had risen another degree. Ahead, the corridor should already have passed beyond the exterior footprint of the underground structure shown on every map available to him. There was supposed to be packed earth beyond that point. Yet the walls continued.
A faint sound came from somewhere ahead. Karim held up one hand and everyone stopped. For a moment there was only the small mechanical noise of their equipment and the distant movement of air through the breach behind them.
Then it came again. A click of metal against metal. Karim stared into the dark. Several seconds passed before a rectangular patch of amber light appeared far ahead, beyond where the corridor could possibly exist. It did not flicker or gradually brighten. It simply came on behind a pane of glass, as though someone had reached for a switch in a room that should have been buried inside solid rock.
Dominik moved closer to Karim’s shoulder. “Tell me that’s on the map.” Karim looked down. The display showed solid earth.
The irregular region began farther west. They were not even supposed to have reached it yet. Karim raised the communication unit and let his thumb rest against the channel for a moment before activating it.
“Ascendancy.”
He waited for the connection indicator while the amber light remained ahead of them. Then he looked back toward the entrance they had cut open. He could still see the old blast door, the pale tunnel beyond it and imagined the civilians waiting there for their indication to enter. It looked close enough to reach in a short sprint, but the instruments insisted it was more than fifty meters away.
Karim swallowed and waited for the relay system to deliver the message back to the Kremlin.
“Sir, this map is wrong.”
He looked forward again and knew, almost immediately, that wasn’t accurate. The map had been right all the way here. The corridor was wrong. Karim stared at the impossible stretch of masonry disappearing into darkness and corrected himself before anyone could answer.
“No. It’s not the map. We are wrong.”
Above them, the tunnel that brought them here had taken hours for the six of them to cut through the buried city grid, angling toward coordinates the Kremlin said corresponded to an old access point into the Undercity infrastructure. If the route worked, it could give them a path toward the hospital district without excavating another full surface corridor through twenty meters of snow.
The problem was the entrance. Their tunnel ended in what looked, at first glance, like an ordinary concrete wall. Once the surrounding snow and debris had been cleared, the remains of an old service vestibule emerged from beneath it: cracked masonry, a corroded lintel, and the outline of a heavy steel door was entombed behind later construction.
Whatever it had once been, someone had sealed it thoroughly. The steel had been welded at the frame, then covered behind poured concrete thick enough that a conventional crew would have spent hours drilling through it, assuming the vibration did not damage whatever remained behind the wall. Under ordinary conditions the entrance was effectively impassable. It was almost funny how ordinary conditions had become increasingly irrelevant.
That was why all six Dominions on site were standing beneath a knotted off orb of working lights considering how to proceed. Conventional rescue personnel waited farther back, beyond the reinforced section of the branch tunnel. Karim had insisted on that much before anyone touched the seal. They determined the safe point behind which all the civilians remained, a place of retreat if one was needed. From his place in the Kremlin guiding their process, Ascendancy had agreed. Then he had released the maps that now populated all their displays.
Karim stood with the tablet balanced against one palm, studying the section that had appeared in his clearance less than ten minutes earlier. The difference between these maps and the municipal records was immediately apparent. Whole passages existed where the government surveys showed nothing. Service corridors connected facilities that officially had no connection at all. Old bunkers, maintenance routes and buried structures spread beneath Moscow in a network far more extensive than Karim had suspected. Someone had mapped it all carefully. Very carefully.
Distances were marked. Elevations recorded. Collapses noted. Some routes carried dates suggesting they had been physically inspected in the recent past. Whoever had done the work had gone far beyond compiling forgotten city plans. They had been down here. Walked these paths themselves. Karim couldn’t fathom who.
He enlarged the section closest to their position. Their new map confirmed that behind the sealed entrance lay a descending passage into an Undercity corridor. That route continued west before joining a larger artery that could potentially carry them toward Devichye Pole and the hospital district.
But along the way, the detail gradually became sparse. There was no notation indicating uncertainty or an inaccessible survey area. The map simply suggested the region was irregular. Several passages approached this particular area and seemingly curved around despite every structural reason suggested it should continue straight. However, even if they had to take a round-about path, it would still be swifter than above ground tunneling.
Dominik stood beside him, bundled against the cold that followed them even this far beneath the city. The cigarette Karim had forbidden him to smoke remained somewhere inside his coat, although Dominik’s fingers had developed an irritating habit of checking that fact whenever he thought Karim was not looking. He glanced at Karim’s face and said, “You have the face.”
Karim kept studying the map. “What face?”
“The one you get when you’re offended.”
Karim enlarged the sparse region another increment and grumbled.
“I just wish I knew who made this map.”
Dominik leaned closer. “Guess we’ll never know.”
They knew what was immediately behind the wall. They knew the first corridor had once been structurally sound. They knew where it should lead. All they had to do was open it, go straight, and should be able to confirm everything was structurally sound, and admit the civilians in behind them. It was the word should that bothered him.
It was only a short time ago that Ascendancy’s instructions had been issued to hold their position and wait for the very maps to load that were now in their possession. That they were not to extend farther than necessary until they knew what was on the other side. Karim had expected the next order to be one of retreat, but instead the opposite came.
Proceed.
There had been no explanation for the change from caution to proceeding, and Karim had not asked for one. Ascendancy was awake again, apparently earlier than planned, and his tone had made clear that whatever had interrupted his rest had also changed the nature of the operation.
He handed the tablet off and approached the wall. Their first task was not to break through. It was to understand how the entrance had been closed. Karim crouched near the exposed edge of the old frame and examined the concrete. It had been poured after the original structure was built that much was clear to the plain eye. But the Kremlin’s records said that there was steel beneath had been welded before that. A second layer of masonry had later been added over part of the vestibule. Three separate acts of closure. It seemed unusual but not impossible. Civil-defense infrastructure was abandoned badly all the time. Entrances were sealed in stages. Governments changed. Records disappeared. Someone worried about liability twenty years after someone else worried about security. Karim knew all of that. He still disliked it.
Dominik watched him a moment before asking,
“Fuck, Karim. Come on? Are you going to stare it open?”
Karim rose, fixing him with a look that Dominik couldn’t quite decide if he was serious. “I was considering making you dig it out by hand.”
As he finished speaking, Karim stepped back and seized the Power. Opening the entrance required far less force than carving the great snow corridors above, but considerably more care. He did not want to blast through the seal and discover that fifty years of corrosion had left half the structure waiting for an excuse to collapse. Around him, the others readied their power in case they had to suddenly catch something.
Sections of concrete separated cleanly from the older frame and moved aside where they were lowered out of the way rather than dropped. Corroded steel appeared beneath. Flows peeled the welds apart next, working along the frame until an old door finally became visible as a door rather than a shape buried in concrete.
It was thick enough to have once resisted blast pressure. Karim tested the hinges. Frozen with rust. He abandoned them and cut around the frame instead. The door moved inward only a few centimeters before stopping. Everyone went still. Karim felt for resistance through the weave. Not obstruction, but pressure. He eased it farther, and air pushed through the gap blasting him in the face.
Warm air. The difference was not dramatic, perhaps five or six degrees, but after days spent in frozen Moscow it touched his face with unsettling softness. Dominik noticed it too and murmured, “Warm air?.”
Karim glanced at him. “It’s not unusual, unexpected, but sometimes the pressure differences build up.”
Karim turned back toward the opening. The temperature itself was explainable. Deep structures maintained heat. Ground temperature changed slowly. Utility lines could contribute. Occupied areas of the Undercity might be nearby.
Together, the Dominions widened the opening enough to enter. The passage beyond descended gently for several meters before leveling into an old service corridor. It was quite ordinary with concrete walls, exposed pipes, even a cable tray sagging beneath bundles of wiring installed at several different points in history. Water stained one corner of the ceiling, though the floor beneath it was dry. Dust had accumulated along the edges where foot traffic had not disturbed it.
Karim stepped through first and waited. Nothing happened. The others came after them in a loose formation. Their lights pushed farther into the corridor and found nothing remarkable. Behind them, the cut-open blast door remained visible at the end of the short descent. Beyond it lay the pale snow tunnel they had carved through the storm. Beyond that, several kilometers of emergency infrastructure leading eventually back toward the Kremlin.
Karim checked the map as they slowly explored. The dimensions matched. Three-point-one meters wide. Two-point-seven high. The old utility chase along the left wall was exactly where the map said it would be. Even the slight change in elevation appeared correct. He felt ridiculous for being relieved.
They continued. Karim’s headset counted distance automatically as they proceeded.
About twenty meters farther the wall changed from poured concrete to older brick. The map showed the same transition. At thirty meters they passed a sealed service door on the right. Twenty-nine-point-four on the survey. Dominik examined the faded Russian lettering painted across it but did not touch the handle.
The first problem appeared forty-three meters later. Karim stopped, and the others stopped with him. He looked at the map’s display, then compared it to what his eyes beheld ahead. According to the survey, the passage should have ended twelve meters farther on, but the corridor continued well beyond that point before disappearing into darkness beyond the reach of their lights.
Karim walked forward slowly. Twelve meters became fifteen, then eighteen, and still no wall appeared. He checked the survey scale, but it was correct. He checked their positioning data next. The underground signal was weak, but the inertial tracking remained functional. According to the system, he had traveled twenty-one meters from the last marker.
The map allowed twelve-point-six. Karim turned around. The junction was close behind them, but too close. Dominik had stopped several paces away, watching Karim rather than the corridor. “There it is again.”
Karim barely heard him. “What?”
“The face.”
Karim walked back toward the junction. Seven steps. He stopped beneath the crossing pipes and looked at the position marker.
According to the tracker, those seven steps had carried him twenty-one meters.
The place where he had just been standing was perhaps seven meters away. He stood very still. No. Something was wrong with their systems, and he wasn’t going to allow them to proceed and possibly become lost.
Karim reset the inertial tracker and walked forward again, counting this time. At six paces he stopped and checked the reading, but it said he’d moved seventeen meters. He looked down at his feet as though they had somehow become participants in the problem, then returned to the junction. Six paces back.
Seventeen meters again, and Dominik’s humor had vanished.
Karim handed him the tablet. “Stand here.” Dominik took it without comment.
Karim walked forward along the corridor alone, ten meters by his own estimate, but the rangefinder told him he had gone twenty-six. He turned and sighted back toward Dominik who seemed barely far at all.
Every short measurement made sense on its own. Two nearby points remained exactly as far apart as they appeared. It was only when Karim tried to measure the corridor as a whole that the numbers became impossible.
He understood surveying errors. He understood instrument drift, bad maps, subsidence, undocumented reconstruction, even deliberate falsification. None of those could make six steps equal seventeen meters without also moving the people who had watched him take them.
Dominik came closer and said his name quietly. “Karim.”
“I know.”
He looked forward. The corridor appeared normal. That offended him more than if the walls had begun bending. There should have been some visible distortion. A slope. Curvature. Something his eyes could identify and his mind could measure. Instead, there was brick, concrete and old pipes continuing into darkness.
Karim took several more cautious steps, and this time he noticed the temperature had risen another degree. Ahead, the corridor should already have passed beyond the exterior footprint of the underground structure shown on every map available to him. There was supposed to be packed earth beyond that point. Yet the walls continued.
A faint sound came from somewhere ahead. Karim held up one hand and everyone stopped. For a moment there was only the small mechanical noise of their equipment and the distant movement of air through the breach behind them.
Then it came again. A click of metal against metal. Karim stared into the dark. Several seconds passed before a rectangular patch of amber light appeared far ahead, beyond where the corridor could possibly exist. It did not flicker or gradually brighten. It simply came on behind a pane of glass, as though someone had reached for a switch in a room that should have been buried inside solid rock.
Dominik moved closer to Karim’s shoulder. “Tell me that’s on the map.” Karim looked down. The display showed solid earth.
The irregular region began farther west. They were not even supposed to have reached it yet. Karim raised the communication unit and let his thumb rest against the channel for a moment before activating it.
“Ascendancy.”
He waited for the connection indicator while the amber light remained ahead of them. Then he looked back toward the entrance they had cut open. He could still see the old blast door, the pale tunnel beyond it and imagined the civilians waiting there for their indication to enter. It looked close enough to reach in a short sprint, but the instruments insisted it was more than fifty meters away.
Karim swallowed and waited for the relay system to deliver the message back to the Kremlin.
“Sir, this map is wrong.”
He looked forward again and knew, almost immediately, that wasn’t accurate. The map had been right all the way here. The corridor was wrong. Karim stared at the impossible stretch of masonry disappearing into darkness and corrected himself before anyone could answer.
“No. It’s not the map. We are wrong.”
![[Image: Karim-signature.jpg]](https://thefirstage.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Karim-signature.jpg)